The crowd roared with laughter.

Now the speaker ended the anecdote with a blast of fury; there was no humor in his thundering voice as he said, “Skin ’em up, or skin ’em down, but skin ’em!”

As the laughter turned to applause, several voices called out over the din: “You tell ’em, Huey!” “Give ’em hell, big boy!” “Pour it on, Kingfish!”

And this indeed was Huey P. Long, the self-anointed “Kingfish” (after the blackface radio rascal of “Amos ’n’ Andy” fame), former governor of Louisiana, currently United States senator and, for all intents and purposes, dictator of the Pelican State, which he ruled through a yes-man figurehead whose name, appropriately enough, was O.K. Allen. Allen was so used to rubber-stamping Huey’s edicts, it was said that when a leaf blew in the window onto O.K.’s desk, he just signed the fool thing.

This was the populist mastermind seducing the South with his “Share the Wealth” plan, promising each and every American family a yearly income of no less than five thousand dollars, old-age pensions of thirty bucks a month, a homestead, a car, a refrigerator and a radio. This would be accomplished by confiscating from the wealthy anything they possessed in excess of three million dollars. The details shifted, according to the crowd and his own mood, but the Kingfish’s gospel was seductive, in these hard times, and it was spreading.

In this rural crowd, there was at least one damn Yankee: me, Nathan Heller, president (and everything else) of the A-1 Detective Agency of Chicago, Illinois. At the moment I was working as one of a team of three bodyguards traveling with the Kingfish, who was making his way back to Louisiana, by train and car, fresh from his latest Senate-floor filibuster in Washington, D.C.

This visit to the fairgrounds in Oklahoma City was just one of several unofficial campaign stops planned along the way. Just about everybody in the country, even an apolitical nincompoop like yours truly, knew that Huey was gearing up for a presidential bid in 1936. That was why so much of his energetic speechifying this afternoon was devoted to bashing FDR.